Chapter 60 Chapter 60

Chapter 60 Chapter 60
\[PRESENT\]

After the cops arrested Veronica Shirley (Hannah as they knew her) everyone had the same questions in mind. All the hows, whys and whats.

Claudia and Neal didn’t stay for the explanation.

However, they hoped to hear everything from the news later that evening, considering the enormous wave of media reporters crowded outside the gates of the Halest Villa.

The moment they all sat in the living room and bombarded Vincent with all those curious questions, he took a deep, deep breath and dished all the dirt he gathered in Asheville.

“Grandma showed me the ancestral tree of our family,” he said, leaning back on the couch and rubbing his nape. “It’s literally an old book, like this big…” he gestured with his hands, the size mostly exaggerated. “…and this thick… like an archive of sorts. It took me hours to go through all of them. No kidding.” He sighed. “I didn’t even know people still did that.”

“Your grandma is old school,” Sonia Halest supplied with a smile, as if she knew where he was coming from all too well. “And so was your great-grandmother.”

Vincent shook his head. “Yeah, so, whatever. As it turns out, Hannah is a very standard name in our family. It has been used so repeatedly throughout the generations that it was almost impossible to find the right one.”

“But you did…” Ajax pointed out, only partly interested in the conversation, the rest of his mind being somewhere else.

“It was not a cakewalk. I’ll tell you that. With grandma constantly yapping in my ear about my age and ridiculing me for not having a dozen kids already, the focus was almost impossible to attain. Especially when I had those five monstrous records to go through.”

“Why did you have to go through all five?” Ajax snorted. “All you had to do was pick the current one.”

“You think it’s that easy, don’t you? Well, it was not. To find the real Hannah Lancaster, I had to find her parents first. And to find her parents, I had to find which daughter of their parents married into the Lancasters. But then there wasn’t only one occasion when the daughters of the Halest family were married into the Lancasters. So obviously I had to go through and through the details. The one those Dad brought up at the time of introducing Veronica as Hannah. Until they all pointed at one person. Well, three, if you take the dead ones into account. But to our luck, there was only one candidate who stood out. Hannah Lancaster, who currently lives in Berlin and is only fourteen years old.”

“What?” Sonia Halest’s eyes widened.

“My reaction exactly.”

“What happened to your phone?” Ajax questioned, having done with that conversation already.

Vincent grinned goofily at the query. “Well, grandma might have thrown it from the fifth floor when I tried to nudge her out of the room.”

“You could have bought the new one. People were worried here!” He said stiffly before rising to his feet and settling him with an intense glare.

“Hey. You’re saying as if I did that deliberately. Besides, I didn’t have that much time. Five monstrous volumes, remember?” he shouted from behind as he watched Ajax shake his head and leave. “And where the hell are you going?”

“I need to be alone.” Ajax mumbled with a grimace as he saw himself out.

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Twenty minutes later, Ajax found himself sitting in the car outside the bungalow Noémie and he had been staying for the past few weeks.

Every cell in his body was compelling him to go inside and see for himself if Claudia had been telling the truth or not.

Then again, why wouldn’t she be? What motive could she possibly have to lie about such a thing?

Besides, it wasn’t just the words spoken by her that made it impossible for his feet to move. He could feel it like a hole in his chest. Like a vacuum in his life. That she wasn’t there. That the one thing that made this house a home had left long ago, leaving only a skeleton of memories behind.

Leaving him behind.

He still couldn’t believe it, though. How could she go like that? Why didn’t she call him? Why didn’t she tell him that her parents were there to take her away and that she didn’t want to go?

Well, unless…unless she did want to go. Unless that’s all she had wanted since the very beginning. To be with her family. The people she could trust. Not him. Why would she even choose him? He was the fucker who destroyed her life! He was the fucker who didn’t deserve him at all.

For what felt like hours, Ajax simply existed in the car. Sometimes watching the house with a kind of longing that was nearly breaking him from inside, and sometimes just fading in and out of the visions dancing beneath his shut eyes. But no matter how long he sat there, no matter how much he chided himself to move, he couldn’t.

In the end, he admitted the defeat, tugged on his hair with a loud, pained groan and asked the chauffeur to drive him to a different address…